Potential
by William Griner
Summary: Finding herself in the clutches of a knife-wielding kidnapper with a twisted name is horrifying enough for Meryl Singer. The bioethics professor needs Mulder and Scully on the case to determine if "Smiley Don" really is a predator from the future.


Abandoned Warehouse

Cleveland, Ohio

The lights flicked on.

Startled, Dr. Meryl Singer snapped her head left and right, searching for signs of movement in the cobwebbed corners. Seated in a straight-backed chair, limbs held fast, she blinked her way to the awareness that her captor was –

"Here I am."

And he was, a presence stepping into view and looming over her. She recoiled, pulling away from the outstretched hand, but there was no escaping the bonds that held her fast.

"You don't need this anymore." Expecting violence, Singer squeezed her eyes shut to retreat into darkness. The snick of the duct tape peeling off her red mouth caused her to cry out, and the man standing in front of her grinned when she finally looked up at him. "Now, isn't that better?"

"Who are you?"

Singer's voice, normally high and confident enough when she addressed students in an auditorium, now sounded cracked and alien to her.

"I suppose," the man said, stepping back, "that it is time for introductions."

Singer wanted to use this pause to run through the Rolodex of her mind, sort out who her captor was, his motive, how she could escape the cords around her wrists and ankles, but instead she focused on him. Fear shrunk the world to the three-foot space between her and the grinning ghoul.

"I teach at a state university," Singer blurted out. "If it's money you want, I don't –"

The man shook his head.

"They're going to know I'm missing," she continued. "And then –"

"Your parents are both gone. No children. No husband, no boyfriend – no romantic acquaintances of any sort. At 37, you live in the suburbs with a rescue cat that people think you named after the wife of the Israelite king David. But no, you're quick to correct them. Bathsheba is the main character in –"

"'Far from the Madding Crowd,'" Singer interjected. "How would you know all of that? We've never met."

"Nothing about you is a secret to me, including the balances in your checking and savings accounts. No ransom is being sought." He smirked, enjoying some private joke. "My research tells me it will take a while for your disappearance to be reported. After the inevitable discovery, I will be gone and all that will remain is a mystery."

"You can't just grab women from parking lots and -" Singer said.

"What's stopping me?"

Singer's eyes widened. Too terrified to consider what the man had in store for her, she sputtered, "It's – it's not right."

"Oh, Dr. Singer," her captor said, frowning and shaking his head. "Falling back on morality? What would your peers in the Department of Bioethics say about such hypocrisy? Tell me, whose morality am I violating at this moment?"

"The law –"

"Is only a serious consideration if I get caught." Shrugging, he said, "Covering my tracks won't be an issue."

Singer squirmed and gazed past her captor toward the moonlight shining through the windows. Even though it seemed like an eternity since she had been kidnapped while departing from an evening class, in reality it had only been about two hours. Another eternity to go before daylight. But Singer, who had been unceremoniously thrown into the back of a trunk for her ride here, had no idea where "here" was. Even when the sun came up in the morning, was there a chance that someone might stumble by and rescue her in what she assumed was a remote location? Given the slim possibility, the best that Singer could hope for would be to stall her captor and endure until daylight, when a passerby might hear her …

Screams?

The professor inhaled, exhaled, working to control her breathing. She surveyed her surroundings, noting again that this site was just what it appeared to be, an abandoned warehouse, more than suitable for containing her imprisonment and whatever other acts her captor intended to commit. The only objects she saw that were capable of hacking into the cords that bound her were the long, double-edged knives that the man before her now wielded.

He walked off behind her, and in her heightened state of awareness, Singer followed the man's footsteps as he paused and walked back. The beat of her heart hammered in her ears. The slide of the blade across her pale throat that she braced for didn't come as he approached. Instead, the man, holding the knives in one hand, was toting a chair in the other. He placed himself a respectable space in front of Singer.

She studied him, noting that he was of average height and build. Not good-looking, but not unpleasant either, just … plain. Brown, neatly combed hair, no facial hair, no birth marks or visible tattoos that would stand out in a police lineup. She wanted to remember this monster so that when she escaped … if she escaped … she could do her part to put him away forever.

Her captor tilted his head to the left and smirked again, as if he had read her thoughts. The overhead lights reflected off the twin weapons that he balanced carefully on his thighs as he sat back and bit his lip. He regarded her for a long moment before speaking.

"I have no reason to hide my real name," he said. "It just won't mean much to you." Staring off at the far wall, the man bit his lip thoughtfully. "The people like myself who engage in this type of activity usually craft our own titles. In my small circle, I refer to myself as Smiley Don."

"It's not too late to let me go," Singer said. "I don't know anything about you. There is no reason to –"

"There is reason."

"Why?"

"What I do makes me happy. I take all the meaning I need from the happiness it brings me."

"Kidnapping a woman who has never hurt a soul? I pay my taxes, I support charities, I love animals –"

"You occasionally hand $20 bills to homeless people who wander around the city," Smiley Don said, chuckling. "Good for you, Meryl, good for you. What a wonderful person you are. I'm sure that paying those taxes and supporting those charities and loving those cats and dogs really brings you meaning. You regularly lecture the young adults in your classes that we create our own meaning and purpose, and that's how you are living." He raised his hands, palms upward, for effect. "How am I different? I create my own meaning and purpose."

"What do you do?"

Smiley Don leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. Under different circumstances, his smile now would seem boyish. Singer fought to keep her bladder under control.

"For this part, Dr. Singer, you will need to suspend that sense of disbelief that overtakes those of your ilk who are confronted with things you don't understand. Your first notion will be that I'm insane. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe not, but the facts I'm about to relate are just that, facts."

Singer nodded, a little more aggressively than she intended. Although she didn't have a good read on this man, she assumed it would be unwise to pander or patronize.

"Human flight once existed in theory only," Smiley Don began. "Now, imagine waltzing up to the Wright Brothers and proclaiming that one day, mankind would walk on the moon. Think it would strain credibility for the people of that age? Of course."

He clapped his hands, causing Singer to flinch.

"Time travel followed the same arc. The technology to make it possible is not available in your time. In mine, well …"

Singer cleared her throat and spoke carefully. "Are you telling me that you're from the future?"

"The airplane, the automobile," Smiley Don said. "They were once novelties, until innovators took the concepts and ran with them, painstakingly developed them Transportation in your time," he said, waving his hand around, "depends on these devices. Industries are built on them. There is no shortage of innovators in my time. Honesty forbids me from taking credit for technology I didn't create. I never set foot in the research facilities where time travel came to fruition, but …"

"I don't understand what this has to do with me," Singer said.

"Getting there, getting there." The man shifted in his seat and held one of the six-inch blades up for the professor's inspection. It appeared to be razor-sharp. "If you become impatient, just consider what happens when the story is over."

Singer's fingertips danced over the knots binding her, but she couldn't produce the traction necessary to untie them.

"Technology didn't make me who or what I am," Smiley Don said. "The capability to jump into previous ages only refined me. In my childhood, I had exhibited behavior that troubled my parents when I didn't effectively hide it. They always seemed afraid to do what you are forced to do now – look the beast in the eyes and see it for what it is.

"In their naivete, my mother and father rolled the dice and relied on education to soften my rough edges. Books were always available, but I grabbed ideas from Bradbury's 'A Sound of Thunder' that wouldn't have been approved of at home. Then, as I grew and the time came for me to find my place in the world, they sent me to a place where I was exposed to the finest minds available. And what an awakening it was."

Smiley Don drifted off for a moment, and Singer realized he was reliving a memory.

"Life issues permeated the discussions and debates those days. Matters of personhood, utilitarianism … weighty subjects for young minds. The self-proclaimed smartest people of the day told me what I already knew. Until your contributions to society can be measured, what are you worth?" He slapped his knee. "Nothing, that's what. Nothing. Potential is a mere abstract."

Singer said, "Are you saying that I don't matter?"

Smiley Don sighed.

"I enjoy what I do. I took the name of an extinct creature as I launched this fulfilling endeavor, jumping into the past for the purpose of hunting. Even in my time, however, there are certain restrictions on behavior that must be followed to keep society humming along. So, in the interests of obeying laws, like-minded souls of my day crafted a happy medium. We hunt in the past."

The professor shuddered. She needed this nightmare to end, but now her captor was rising from his chair and pacing the long concrete floor in front of her. He turned, grinning at her as he closed the distance. Singer felt cold, but the man's body heat radiated off him in waves as he knelt there and stared in her wide eyes.

"In some respects, I am paying tribute," Smiley Don said. "On a more personal, intimate level, well … it will be fun playing with someone attractive."

He stood up. The steely points of the knives filled Singer's line of sight. Teasingly, he drew the edge like a finger ever so delicately across one of her cheeks, then the other. If she moved, she risked slicing her own face open.

Because Smiley Don's back was turned, he didn't see the flurry of movement behind him. He didn't react until the warehouse door, flung open violently, closed just as suddenly with a metallic bang in the empty warehouse. The two figures that had sprung through the door split apart, left and right, racing toward the man holding the twin daggers.

"FBI, freeze!"

The woman, a red head pointing a pistol at Smiley Don, followed up her order with another. "Drop the knives and get on the floor!"

The woman's partner circled around and, grabbing the back of Singer's chair, scooted her backwards. "Got him, Scully?"

Smiley Don now lay on his stomach, handcuffed and gazing up in anger at the two federal officers. "He's secure. Check Dr. Singer for injuries."

"I'm fine," Singer said. Her hands were suddenly free, and she rubbed her wrists as the tall man who had untied her set to work on the cords around her ankles. Peering down now at her would-be killer, who wrestled indignantly as the female FBI agent searched him for other weapons, she realized that she was fine. "He didn't … you got here …"

"Mulder, get Dr. Singer outside."

Interview Room

Cleveland Police Department

The FBI agent named Fox Mulder did most of the talking initially.

"When we expanded our search parameters further back, accounting for the last sixty years, a pattern emerged. Our profile was based off that pattern."

Singer shook her head. "Agent Mulder, you don't believe that man came from the future, do you?"

"Taking into account the relevant research on –"

Agent Dana Scully interrupted. "The unfortunate reality is that serial killers often breed copycats. Just as we were able to spot a pattern, we believe the suspect had conducted his own form of research and subsequently adopted the MO of a predecessor."

The professor, nursing a cup of coffee brewed in the department's break room, took a sip before asking her question. "Why did he come after me?"

"We're still working on the victimology," Mulder said.

"Agent Mulder, you said this was an X-File. Do you believe this man is really from the future?"

Scully cut her partner off again. "The killer chooses to believe he is a time-traveler as part of his unique psychosis. However, he is a serial killer, and as such, he tends to stay within an area where he feels most comfortable."

"And how did you catch him?"

"The profile," Mulder said, and Scully interrupted.

"We were fortunate tonight. A student returning to look for her dropped notebook happened to see the suspect grab you and drive away."

"Luck," Singer said, squeezing her eyes shut.

"Fate, maybe." Mulder took a sip of black brew from his own Styrofoam cup. "In any case, we are interested in determining all we can about –"

The door to the small interview room opened, and a uniformed officer stepped inside and gestured for the two agents to follow him in the hallway. "Be right back," Scully said to Singer.

Mulder and Scully followed the cop through the twists and turns of the precinct to another room where they knew that Smiley Don had been housed for a full interrogation. "What's going on, Officer?" Mulder asked.

The cop, an African American male in his 20s named Reynolds, shook his head. "You're gonna have to see it to believe it."

The FBI agents joined a cadre of detectives and uniforms in filling the room where Smiley Don had been only twenty minutes earlier. A sickening odor in the small space greeted Mulder and Scully. "What burned in here?" Mulder asked.

"The suspect," Reynolds replied.

Scully's sharp blue eyes noticed what the others had been looking at on the floor when she arrived. A pile of ashes, still warm to the touch, took up space in the bolted down metal chair where a suspect had recently been.

"The cameras," Mulder said.

"Never seen anything like it," an older detective said. "He was in cuffs, just sitting there, fidgeting."

"You were in the room with him?" Scully asked.

"I was," the detective answered. "When he started fooling around with this spot on his wrist, I figured it was some kind of drug thing. Not unusual in itself. But then –"

The detective, who later introduced himself as Sgt. Eduardo Rivera, explained that the suspect in custody had ignited in an explosive flash of light. No chemicals or fluids of any type had been present in the concrete room. "I know this is gonna sound crazy," Rivera said, "but it was almost like some kinda –"

"Self-destruct mechanism," Mulder continued for him.

One Year Later

Department of Bioethics

Cleveland, Ohio

Dr. Meryl Singer, at home in these teaching moments, recited the points of her lecture while simultaneously studying the faces in the front row of her audience.

The kidnapping had taken a toll on her mind, as it would for anyone, but the institute had wisely chosen to upgrade its security in the wake of the incident.

For her part, Singer had recovered and welcomed a return to her routine. The brush with death had made her realize just how far she had to go in terms of building a legacy. It wouldn't be just the pages in scholarly journals that would outlast her. There were also the minds that she had helped to shape in the hours of lecture. What great works might some of those minds go on to produce?

"A physician, a scientist," she said from her podium. "Think of their value in terms of the lives they touch. How is that value measured?"

A young woman in front raised her hand, and Singer nodded. "According to your writings, we give them value based on what they do for society."

"Correct." Having affirmed the student, Singer continued. "We must look at the world in terms of its limited resources, its limited space. Matters of personhood and value cannot be debated or measured in the abstract. When we as a society must ask the hard questions of what a person truly is …"

A hand was raised. Singer nodded at the young man in the third row. "It is your belief then, Dr. Singer, that those of us in a position to do so must ultimately decide who gets to live on those resources?"

"It is my belief," Singer said, head tilted thoughtfully to give her answer more weight. "My belief and conviction. Now, on the matter of resources …"


End file.
